A number of years ago I ventured out to see the play Shadowlands by William Nicholson. It’s about C.S. Lewis’ relationship with Joy Davidson, one of his avid followers. They became friends, as up to that point Lewis was a life-long confirmed bachelor. He married Davidson in order to satisfy immigration regulations, as a favor, although they remained merely friends. Then Joy Davidson became ill and that’s when Lewis realized he was in love. So he married her a second time, this time in the hospital. They had a short time together and then her cancer returned and she died.
In the play he asks: “If God loves us, why does He allow us to suffer so much? ...What possible point can there be to such tragedy? Isn’t God supposed to be good?”
A clergy friend tries to comfort Lewis. “We have to have faith that God knows.” Lewis responds, “God knows. Yes, God knows. I don’t doubt that. But does God care? Did God care about Joy?”
It’s the ultimate human question. Does God care about us and our loved ones? Is God invested in what happens to us as we journey through this world or are we ultimately on our own? This question is particularly poignant in light of suffering. It seems like you can’t think about suffering without thinking about God, and God’s relationship to suffering. Does God cause it, allow it, use it, or endure it like we do? Does God care? Does God exist?
And it is precisely at this point—this poignantly human plea to be known, cared for, to be shown some mercy and kindness -- that the Gospel of Jesus Christ makes a provocative assertion—about God and about us. “We proclaim Christ crucified,” Paul put it.
In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul almost playfully describes it as foolishness, unapologetic about the crucified Christ’s contrast to the many sophist alternatives of his day. The Greek culture in which Paul and the early Christian church lived had no objection to the notion of monotheism. Plato taught that goodness was one—that there was one absolute good, one god. The Greeks rather liked the idea. Their philosophers reasoned that if god was one, god must be perfect. God must need nothing. God must want nothing. It’s very logical. There is even a word for it in Greek—apatheia—from which we get the word apathy. It means the absolute, metaphysical perfection of God.
But Paul said, “We preach Christ crucified,” utter foolishness to Greek thinkers who want a god of perfection, a god who transcends human life, its messiness, its pain and suffering, and also its passion and ecstasy.
“For the message about the cross is foolishness . . . a stumbling block. . . .but God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” Christian faith is about a God who is not perfect in the Greek philosophic sense of the word, but a God who has wants and desires, a God who laughs and weeps, who rejoices and grieves, a God capable of anger and remorse and profound love, a God who, because of love, suffers.
So when we talk about suffering and God, we begin with this God, a God who experiences suffering for the sake of love; a God who is vulnerable; a God, who in every way, became one of us; a God who did not count equality with God as something to be used to his own advantage but taking on human form suffered and loved like every other human.
Christian faith makes the radical proposal that the goal of life is not to protect ourselves from suffering, but to make ourselves vulnerable, to expose ourselves to suffering for the sake of love. The goal is not, that is to say, to save our lives, but to find some way to give them away. The claim is that the cross is more than a symbol of tragedy but, because it is God’s own son on the cross, it is supremely, mysteriously, but profoundly a symbol of love.
Foolishness—God’s love—wiser than human wisdom—weakness stronger than human strength.
